The present invention is related to a computer environment wherein many hosts running in the Central Electronic Complex (CEC) of the computer are sharing an adapter connecting the CEC to a Local Area network (LAN), and is more particularly related to dynamically determining the most efficient number of packets that can be grouped together for network traffic flowing from the hosts to the LAN.
In an adapter sharing environment, many Hosts have connections to the same NIC (Network Interface Adapter). At any one time, the packet and data rates of the network traffic flowing across any of these connections can change. The NIC must be sensitive to these rates since it is being shared by many Hosts. The number of packets grouped together (blocked) as they are transferred across the Main Memory bus from the NIC can have a huge impact on the overall performance of a connection. The amount of time a packet is delayed by the NIC can also have a huge impact on the performance. Some applications are sensitive to latency where others are more throughput oriented. In the shared NIC environment, both sets of applications can be running through the same adapter at the same time. This makes the blocking decisions in this environment even more critical. The NIC must be able to provide the best Blocking Algorithm for a specific application. The Blocking Algorithm used on one connection might not be the most optimal Blocking Algorithm on another connection. The NIC must be able to dynamically learn the best Blocking Algorithm for each application and be able to run different Blocking Algorithms to different applications at the same time. Static Blocking Algorithms cannot be used in this environment.